Come on, I know, you're wondering, who will it be? Jimi Hendrix? Santana? Eric Clapton? BB King? ...
Too easy!
Know that it is not even mentioned in the ranking of 100 Best Rolling Stones Guitarists but it marked a musical era, a style, a way of feeling and characterized an entire nation.
Let's get out of the commercial circuits, I'm talking about Portuguese Carlos Paredes. Who? Portocheee?
Well it is easy to be a famous guitarist when you are American and live in the XNUMXth century. Instead, try to make yourself known to the world when you play one Portuguese guitar (similar to our mandolin), you live in an asphyxiating fascist dictatorship and you are also a communist!
Add also that at some point, around the age of 30 (1958), you even get a year and a half in hard prison for political reasons and then you are condemned to no longer be able to carry out public work for or next 15 years (until the revolution of 1974)!
Paredes' music finds its roots here. It is said that in his cell he continually went back and forth composing songs in his head and pretending to play the guitar. "O louco", the crazyso thought his fellow prisoners.
His career as a musician begins from this detention. Once free, in fact, he wrote the music for a cult Portuguese film, "Green Years" by Paulo Rocha, to then record the first LP "Guitarra portuguesa" a few years later becoming an author for Amalia Rodrigues and a lot doom to come. But Paredes it's not just fado, don't make this mistake (see fusion collaborations with Charlie Haden, inventor with Ornette Colemann of free jazz. At the bottom of this article there are exhaustive links)!
After the carnation revolution of April 25, 1974, which overthrew the fascist regime, he was considered a national hero for holding his head high in the face of the dictatorship of Salazar.
But what does it do at this point? He goes back to his old job (!), In the administration of a hospital in St. Joseph, maintaining a rather modest profile. He explains why
"I love music too much to live in"
So he didn't even become a professional musician; rather a sincere lover, who plays his love embrace. A feeling so deep that he thought of suicide only once in his life (and had other reasons!), When he lost his guitar during a plane trip!
Il 23th July (from 2004), in a few days, is the date of his death, I liked to remember that.
The newspaper Correio da Manha, 11 years ago he opened the edition with: "The maestro has stopped playing".
He retired from the stage, due to bone problems, in 1993, the same year I was living in Lisbon and, without even knowing who he was, I remember being prophetically posted in one of his concerts, one evening of his last year of music, listening to the notes of an elderly man who was playing a melody with a strange guitar, which moved me a lot. It took a few more years to understand this better Master who moves without making you cry, in my opinion, the musical transliteration of the nostalgia Portuguese.
He is buried with ours Antonio Tabucchi, artist of other art, in Cemetery of Pleasures (Dos Prazeres Cemetery), in the area that home the artists.
He is remembered among the greatest Portuguese in the world.
“When I die, my guitar will die too. My father used to say that once he died he wanted his guitar to be destroyed and buried with him. I also want to do the same. If I really have to die. "
Carlos Paredes
Nobel laureate José Saramago, also Portuguese and contemporary, writes that “[Carlos Paredes's] music was made of sunrises, songs of birds announcing the sun.
We had to wait another ten years before another dawn opened the doors of freedom (editor's note: the 1974 revolution), but the unforgettable theme of Verdi Years […] For us it was a sort of lay prayer that united hope and will. It was a lot but not yet all. There was no knowledge of man from ingenious fingers, the man who showed us how beautiful and robust the sound of a guitar could be […] an extraordinary example of simplicity and greatness of character. It was not necessary for Carlos Paderes to ask us to open the doors of the heart. They were always wide open. "
I leave you some excerpts:
Perpetual movement (1971 - from the second self-titled album)
With the Madredeus in 1992
Green Years (1962)
Song for Che - with Charlie Haben
Fun & Leisure (1967 - from the first album "guitarra portuguesa")
And if you want to follow the paths that his songs have taken over time, look for the versions of "Verdes anos" by Kronos Quartet, Dulce pontes, Buddha Power Blues, Stereosaurus and many others that you can find online ("perpetual movement" on electric guitar it's deadly!). A tribute that in 2003 had a good radio response is Viva by Sam the Kid, a modern remix of his songs.
